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Trump has fired his chief of staff Susie Wiles and replaced her with Stephen Miller, the architect of his mass deportation agenda. A newly unsealed court transcript shows a government lawyer admitting the U.S. plans to deport people to Iran, where they will likely be killed. The White House sent a memo to 3,000 conservative organizations warning that their public statements are being monitored. And Florida just elected a man with neo-Nazi ties.
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The last adult in the room just got fired for the guy who wanted to put alligators in the Rio Grande.
Trump announced Friday he is removing chief of staff Susie Wiles and promoting deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller to take over the role starting Monday, November 9. The shakeup follows a sweeping defeat for Republicans in the midterm elections that gave both chambers of Congress to Democrats.
Trump announced the move on Truth Social, calling Wiles’ work outstanding and saying she would be moved to his political operation. He did not admit that the shake-up was due to the midterm losses, but multiple reports say he has been questioning the performance of top aides since the results came in Tuesday.
Wiles is the latest in a long line of women to leave the Trump administration, including press secretary Karoline Leavitt, former Attorney General Pam Bondi, former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, former Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer, and former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.
Miller is one of the main architects of the administration’s aggressive mass deportation campaign and some of its most divisive immigration policies. As chief of staff, he will control which people and which policies reach the president’s desk.
The last time a government sent people to a country it was at war with, we built a museum about it.
A government lawyer admitted under questioning that the U.S. is planning to deport people in its custody to Iran, a country it is actively bombing, according to a newly unsealed court transcript from the case Iranian American Legal Defense Fund v. Rubio. The judge compared the plan to sending people back to Nazi Germany in 1942.
The judge asked the lawyer directly: “What you’re telling me is that the United States of America is going to send individuals back to that region facing what you and I and everyone who would ever look at this would know would be at a minimum a serious threat of certain death?” The lawyer then confirmed it.
The Trump administration started sharing confidential asylum files with the Iranian government in March 2025, including files belonging to pro-democracy protesters, religious minorities, and LGBTQ people who fled Iran. The Public Citizen Litigation Group sued, saying the policy violates federal confidentiality rules and endangers asylum seekers and their families.
Michael Kirkpatrick, an attorney for the plaintiffs, said the administration is knowingly sending people to a country where they are likely to be jailed or killed. The lawsuit asks the court to stop sharing the information and to notify every asylum seeker whose file was handed over.
Nixon at least had the decency to spy on the other party.
The White House Office of Public Liaison sent an email to around 3,000 conservative groups Thursday promising to fight for his agenda against the incoming Democratic majorities. The message ended with a highlighted sentence that said: “As always, we are monitoring statements, press releases, and media engagements from your organizations.”
Two leaders of major conservative groups confirmed they had received the memo. The White House claimed the communication was part of its regular outreach to inform and mobilize its coalition.
An earlier email, sent on October 1, did not explicitly state that the groups’ public communications were being monitored. Instead, it told groups to flag supportive statements and media appearances on specified policies.
The memo arrived as prominent Republicans began to publicly break with the president over Tuesday’s losses. Vice President JD Vance attributed the party’s loss to the Iran war, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis described the results as an extinction-level event for Republicans, and Texas Senator Ted Cruz condemned the long war and the effect of tariffs on consumers.
It took 37 years for someone to make David Duke look moderate by comparison.
Florida voters on Tuesday elected Marshall Rawson, a 34-year-old Republican with ties to the neo-Nazi movement, to the Florida State House of Representatives. Rawson beat his Democratic opponent, Merrillee Malwitz-Jipson, by more than 36 points.
Rawson has supported slavery, advocated lynching, and called for the execution of LGBTQ people. He was a member of the League of the South, a white supremacist and neo-Confederate organization, and marched with white supremacists at the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville.
Talking Points Memo reported that Rawson’s election makes him one of the most extreme candidates elected to public office since former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan David Duke was elected in 1989. He also received campaign donations from dozens of people with ties to right-wing extremist groups.
TPM reached out to 28 current and former Florida GOP figures, 22 of whom endorsed Rawson, to ask if they would condemn his views. None of them did.
Tuesday happened because millions of people refused to be told what to think by billionaires trying to buy an election. Independent media played a role in that. We told you about the deportation abuses, the corruption, and the conflicts of interest that the mainstream media tried to bury.
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Texas Went So Blue Talarico Got More Early Votes Than Paxton Got in Total. Democrat James Talarico crushed Republican Ken Paxton in the Texas Senate race with more than 5.4 million votes. Talarico won by 13 points and became the first Democrat to win a Texas Senate seat since 1988. Talarico alone received nearly 150,000 more early votes than Paxton did in total, a gap that mirrored record-setting early turnout of 7.7 million Texans. Trump made four visits to Texas to stump for Paxton during a blitz of rallies last month, but 46 percent of Texans disapproved of Paxton’s job performance heading into Election Day. The blue wave also washed Republican Governor Greg Abbott out of office in favor of Democrat Gina Hinojosa, who will be the first Latina governor in Texas history.
** Tesla Will Stop Making the Cybertruck After Years of Weak Sales.** Tesla will halt Cybertruck production at its Texas plant in the middle of next year to make way for the company’s self-driving taxi, Elon Musk announced Friday. Tesla sold just 8,300 Cybertrucks in the third quarter of 2026, falling far short of its target of 200,000 Cybertrucks in a year. Shares of Tesla fell 11 percent on Thursday after the Democratic midterm sweep, as investors brace for new congressional probes and tougher regulations on Musk’s companies. Democrats have said they plan to look into Musk’s leadership of the defunct Department of Government Efficiency, his companies’ federal contracts, and his role in cutting off Ukraine’s access to Starlink.
California Governor Newsom Grants Clemency to All 548 Death Row Inmates. On Thursday, Governor Gavin Newsom said he would commute the death sentences of all 548 inmates on California’s death row, the largest in the western hemisphere, to life in prison without the possibility of parole. It is the largest mass clemency of death row inmates by any U.S. governor in recent years, according to the U.S. Campaign to End the Death Penalty. Newsom, who put a moratorium on executions in March 2019, wrote in a letter to Californians that the condemned will die in prison but not by the state’s hand. California has not executed a prisoner since 2006.
Democrat Scott Colom Flips County Named for KKK Founder in Mississippi Senate Race. Scott Colom, the Mississippi Democratic U.S. Senate candidate, captured a majority of votes in Forrest County, a historically conservative county named for Ku Klux Klan founder Nathan Bedford Forrest. Colom led Republican incumbent Cindy Hyde-Smith 54 percent to 44 percent in the county, a 29-point shift from Donald Trump’s 2024 lead there. Colom, who has a slim statewide lead, would be the first Black U.S. senator from Mississippi since 1881 during the Reconstruction era. Hattiesburg, in Forrest County, is where civil rights groups organized in the 1960s to fight for voting rights after a segregationist clerk made Black voters answer questions like “How many bubbles are in a bar of soap?” before they could register.
